Saturday, 19 July 2014

Down to the sea in ships

On the other side of the water you get much more of a
sense of Liverpool as a maritime city. During a recent trip to New Brighton to
see the Perch Rock lighthouse, I saw a massive container ship, crammed full of
those familiar multi-coloured metal boxes, being guided slowly into the
Seaforth docks by two tugboats. According to Colin Davies, in his book Prefab, the rise of the shipping
container as sustaining force of the modern world is down to one man: Malcolm
McClean, an American trucking entrepreneur who, in the 1950s, persuaded port
authorities and shipping companies ‘to stop gazing into the cavernous holds of
ships and turn attention instead to the long, narrow forms of the lorries,
trains and barges that carried the goods to and from the port’. McClean’s achievement was to ensure the global dominance of the ISI (International
Standards Organisation) shipping container: a twenty-feet by eight-feet by
eight-feet stackable steel box which meant that the goods did not need to be
handled when transferring between different forms of transport like a ship and
a lorry. Shipping containers throughout the world are now all the same shape
and size although there are different kinds for different cargoes:
side-opening, end-opening, open-topped and air-conditioned ‘reefers’. A
container can even be turned into a site office by adding a door and a couple
of windows.

The view from New Brighton inspired me to read Horatio
Clare’s excellent Down to the Sea in
Ships, about his journey round the world on two container ships. The title
is of course from Psalm 107: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships and do business in
great waters, they see the workings of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.’ This
is what Clare also discovers,‘a parallel world which sustains
the one we inhabit’.The sailors on container ships, many of them Filipinos
paid shamefully less than the rest of the crew, are ignorant of what is in the
containers because otherwise the shipping companies think they will be tempted
to steal the contents. But ‘informed guesswork suggests we will have flashy
cars in some of the boxes - the kind no one wants to risk on a car carrier -
and scrap metals for China’s hungry markets, and paper and plastic waste for
recycling or disposal.’

At the end of
his journey Clare says he felt like the Ancient Mariner, wanting to stoppeth
one in three and say ‘listen, there is a ship at sea tonight, and this is who
is on board, and this is what their lives are like, and without them none of
this world you call normal would exist’. He, meanwhile, ‘will always be able to
hear the moans and whistles of her stairwell, her ghost music, the muted and
ceaseless piano of her theme tune, and the enduring, resisting stoicism of the
men who sing and hum her on.’

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
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